LG Display peels back magnetic wallpaper OLED TV panel

LCD panels have enabled widescreen TVs thin and light enough to be hung on a wall like a picture – assuming you hang
your pictures with a VESA-compliant wall mount. But LG Display has gone one
step further, showing an OLED panel that can be stuck to a wall like
wallpaper – assuming you hang your wallpaper with magnets.

LG Display showcased its 55-inch
"wallpaper OLED panel" – or possibly the world's biggest fridge magnet – this week at a media event in Seoul. In
comparison to LG's current flagship 55-inch OLED TV that is 4.3 mm thick, the
new panel is just 0.97 mm thick and weighs 1.9 kg (4.1 lb). It is also flexible, making
it easy to peel off a magnetic mat affixed to the wall.

Competitors such as Samsung and Sony
seem to have largely dropped out of the OLED race and pinned their hopes on the next
evolution of LCD technology, quantum dot. But the head of LG Display's OLED division, Yeo
Sang-deog, promised his company would be scaling up OLED production later this
year to meet client demand. Although LG Display is an independent company and
supplies panels to a various companies, including Dell, ASUS and Apple, its
biggest customer is affiliate LG Electronics.

Earlier this year, LG Display released OLED
panels in 55-, 65- and 77-inch sizes, with LG showing TVs utilizing the panels
at CES. Now the company plans to go even bigger, with Yeo promising a 99-inch
unit within the year. But he says it won't be ignoring the small- to mid-sized
displays, with plans to continue improvements to its plastic OLED technology
for use in transparent, rollable and flexible displays for wearable devices and
vehicle dashboards.

Yeo added that improvements in yields for
OLED panels would be a key factor in helping it achieve sales targets of 600,000
OLED panels this year and 1.5 million units in 2016.

"It has
taken a year and half for us to raise the yield to this level (for OLEDs),
while it'd taken nearly 10 years to achieve the yield for LCDs," Yeo said.

There's no telling when a wallpaper OLED
might be headed to the walls of consumers' houses, but the idea of a TV that
sticks to a wall like a fridge magnet is sure to be "attractive" to
many.